Innovating Victory: Naval Technology in Three Wars

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In response, scientists, technicians, and inventors supplied a steady stream of new products that helped make victory possible. Innovating Victory: Naval Technology in Three Wars, studies how the world's navies incorporated new technologies into their ships, their practices, and their doctrine. A point that O’Hara and Heinz make to explain this differential in development time is that there is an emotional current to developing technology. These human factors all contributed equally, or more so, than the science and engineering did in developing these technologies into effective weapon systems.

The most famous naval action of the nineteenth century, the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar, was fought by the British and Franco-Spanish navies with wooden, wind-propelled line of battle ships and guns that fired solid shot weighing up to forty pounds out to four hundred yards.Navies will still require wings, but those wings may well prove to be of a new type (such as unmanned drones) flying from new platforms rather than large, expensive aircraft flying from large, expensive ships. Ask, for example, what is a weapon without a target, or a platform without a weapon, or a tool without a use? Technology was hardly the only force that shaped naval warfare in the twentieth century, but it was a force that navies always had to take into account.

By 1945, within the span of a Jutland officer’s service career, basic naval technologies included radar and guided weapons. As the 2008 banking crisis and COVID pandemic have clearly demonstrated, the world can generate vast sums of money in times of emergency. The atomic bomb was arguably the most significant new technology developed during the war, as well as the most complex.If the capital ship represents a synthesis of many technologies, then one can easily argue that behind the technological progress that produced this synthesis, there was profound innovation.

The authors argue that assessing innovation ultimately must go through the crucible of combat to assess and develop the technology for the purposes of ‘securing power at sea. Innovating Victory: Naval Technology in Three Wars studies how the world’s navies incorporated new technologies into their ships, their practices, and their doctrine. In the second wave, which started in 1905 and ran through World War I, naval warfare became three-dimensional with the development of practical submarines and aircraft. A secret memorandum from a British destroyer captain to his superior officer dated 26 December 1942 noted that he had at his disposal Type 285, 286, and 271 radars, sonar, a radio interception device, very high frequency radio, shore radar plots, enemy reports from remote sources, an automatic plotting device, and several binocular-enhanced sets of eyes.Heinz present new perspectives and explore the process of technological introduction and innovation in a way that is relevant to today's navies, which face challenges and questions even greater than those of 1904, 1914, and 1939. The exploration of a half dozen key naval innovative technologies covers all major navies; no one nation has a corner on innovation. A paradox can exist with technologies that help us do more with less: they can increase consumption of the very resources one is trying to conserve. By 1944, synthetic rubber plants were producing around 800,000 tons of material annually for the war effort. It considers how a new technology threatened its opponents, not to mention its users, and how those threats were managed.

Not only are the technical hurdles and doctrinal changes discussed, but so are the operational challenges and the adversary’s response or adoption. But history tells us that, with the right investments and organisation, things could be very different. The admirals who developed fleet tactics were busy men with little time to explore the possibilities of untested technology. S. Navy, 1898-1945 Innovating Victory: Naval Technology in Three Wars studies how the world's navies incorporated new technologies into their ships, their practices, and their doctrine.

In 1942, however, Japan seized both of these regions, effectively cutting off the US supply of natural rubber. The strategic implication, which admiralties were reluctant to grasp, was that combat between fleets of capital ships had become a defensive exercise. Naval professionals throughout the long decades of peace leading up to 1914 expended great effort trying to keep pace with the tactical implications of rapidly changing capital ship technology. Much of the information derived from these tools required instantaneous action, not to mention the fact that he had many other things to think of and duties to perform in action, particularly under conditions of modern night action.